free variable

John Carmack shares some thoughts on static program analysis for finding defects. The whole article is a good read, but I especially appreciated his tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Microsoft’s pricing model for their analysis tools (free in the Xbox developer kit, but very expensive in the Windows developer kit): “I read into this that Microsoft feels that game quality on the [Xbox] 360 impacts them more than application quality on Windows does.”

Also, see this related and hilarious photo, especially if we went to grad school together. (Photo link via Pascal Cuoq.)